Re: Discussing issues

Havoc Pennington <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sometimes you seem to be worried about "vested interests"; honestly,
> I'm not sure what you mean by that. Some people have said to me that
> you mean Linux vs. BSD, and some have said you mean corporate
> influence. 

At the end of the day, *everyone* involved with XFree86 has some kind of 
vested interest. For some it is simple because the run XFree86 on their 
own personal systems or systems where they work, so they want the best 
experience there. 

For others there are commerical vested interests involved, because the 
employer they work for gets paid through direct or indirect means through 
the use of XFree86. For instance Mike Harris, Havoc Penington and Alan 
Cox all work for Red Hat, so they have a commercial vested interest. Mark 
Vojkovich works for NVIDIA, so he also has NVIDIA's commercial vested 
interests to dela with. Frank LaMonica, Jens Owen, Alan Hourihane and 
Dave Dawes all work for Tungsten Graphics and either directly or 
indirectly do contract work for ATI, Intel and other companies who have 
commercial vested interests in XFree86. I work for SciTech and we build 
display drivers and very soon will have a drop in XFree86 solution, so we 
have our commercial vested interests at heart.

Commercial vested interests in XFree86 are a fact of life today, whether 
the interests come from proprietry platforms or Open Source platforms. So 
for people to sit back and say they are worried about vested interests 
having taking over control of XFree86, take a step back and realise that 
the key players in XFree86 already have vested interests! Even David 
Dawes, the leader and chairman of the XFree86 BOD has vested interests 
based on the company he works for and the companies he does contract 
development for.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~